I've been given 34 servers (HP Proliant) to use for HPC. Due to the server owners' request, 33 of these will need to act as diskless thick clients, and one will act as DHCP and TFTP server to enable network booting for the others.

The "head" server is already configured with Debian Squeeze and is operational.

The problem lies in how the network is organized:

Each server has 2 network interfaces

Each server has only 1 IP allocated (unmodifiable)

Everything is under a VLAN, so all interfaces interfaces must be given the proper VLAN tag

While setting the interfaces is not difficult, the issue is how to handle the DHCP server: I'm not sure we can use the other network card, and as I said, we cannot request more IPs.

You have a 34 node cluster and can't even use a separate switch (or one that allows port based VLAN mapping) to properly manage this thing?
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Sven♦Jan 30 '13 at 10:20

I have absolutely no control over the network infrastructure, unfortunately. It's kind of "use what you have, don't mess with the rest" type (request by the servers' owners).
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EinarJan 30 '13 at 13:36